Mask, Vengeance
by pherede
Summary: He spent years in the pit, waiting for her, and he won't let her go until she feels what he felt.


Once he watched through a bloody haze of fists and bared teeth as her tiny body leapt against the sunlight far above, like a bird flying across the sun for a moment. In his mind, in the space of five years, through the anguish of his slow recovery and the endless torrent of starvation, violence, and death beyond that, Talia dwindled from a warm and hungry child to a mere fleck of black falling across the sun.

Even at the end of his final battle in the pit, even when the putrefaction of his face crippled him with agony, even when he lay heaving for breath as strangers crowded into his blackening vision, he did not hate her for leaving him. He did not think she lived.

* * *

For months after his rescue he was too sick to hate her. She came and sat by his bed every day, lovely and slim and well-fed; her hair had grown, and she kept it up in a swirling mass of curls at the nape of her neck. He stared at those curls, deranged in the grip of his pain medicine, listening to her speak—_she was seventeen, she had found her father at last, she ate every day twice a day, she had not killed for two years_—and mouthed his own words against the tube that kept him breathing. She could not, of course, understand him, and he forgot his own words within a few minutes, drowning under the drugs.

At last the swelling in his face went down, and what sutures would take had taken. The tube came out; the drugs faded away, and his world became a landscape of pain. All he remembered, later, was the pain—he could not remember the series of clumsy wound vacuums applied to his face, the breathing tubes that were put in and taken out, the specialists and technicians, the endless fittings for his mask. He remembered pain, and brief moments of drugged bliss when he was aware of her slim hand crushing his, and the mass of curls at her nape.

* * *

Within a year, he remembered how to hate. The mask fit well, and though his tongue still rasped strangely over the puckered ruin of his mouth, the caress of painkillers kept agony at bay. He relearned how to speak, picked up another language, acquired a cultured accent, rebuilt his body—discovered, to his shock, that his once-starved frame could carry a tremendous bulk of muscle. Talia's father recruited him, trained him, and kept him away from her so completely that it came as a shock to him when he realized at last, in the midst of putting on a shirt, that he hated Talia so much he could hardly stand the weight of it.

It was not so horrible, at first. He only saw her from a distance, recognized her by the carriage of her frame and the curls at her neck (and later down her back, and later cropped to her ears), and felt the burning alien surge of hatred inside.

Hatred he knew about, the only emotion that thrived in the pit, but this hate was something new to him—a violent urge, a poisonous nauseating resentment, an obsession that gradually invaded even his sleep. He dreamed about his hands crushing her, about his unbroken mouth freed from its mask to bite her, about her delicate body struggling against his strength and being broken. She had been gone for so long! How, in her freedom, had she never once thought to come back for him? Not even a single rope, dangling over the edge of the pit; not even a heel of bread, thrown into the mud where he suffered and bled year after year and imagined her to be nothing but a mote of dust in a sunbeam.

When he looked at her now, he was glad for his mask; he knew that hate and hunger poured from his eyes, and remembered the way his lips would have twisted. The more he watched her, during her brief visits to the dojo, the more she watched him, and the sicker he grew, eaten alive with his rage.

* * *

And still he loved her. After his final initiation, she found her way to him, and used him as a subject for her own experiments in emotion and human interaction. She learned to apologize, and she thanked him and begged his forgiveness, and by God he forgave her, but the hate would not die.

He learned the clean smell of her, breathed her in on the still dusk air while they talked; whatever scent she carried, even his mask could not filter it entirely. He remembered the child she had been, the fierce and thoughtless girl with her stubbled head, and he loved her as he had loved her then. But now, along with the love he had once been so terrified to feel, there was the thick and battling urge to—to choke her, perhaps, to beat her? To crush her to the ground underneath him, to see pain on her face, to have her surrender and see her be overcome? He had no reference for this kind of feeling. It sickened him.

He never allowed his thoughts to stray to other emotions, other attractions. Lust, in the pit, was a dangerous thing; it was a man brutalizing a woman, it was a boy trading favors for bread. It was tarnished with vomit and fear-sweat and it stripped away the last vestiges of humanity from its victims. In his darkest moments, he admitted to himself that he would far rather feel this… whatever he felt, this hate that gnawed him, than to have Talia reduced to something as small as his lust would make her. And when he felt her eyes on him, he wondered how small in her eyes he had become.

Her father hated him, the more so once he discovered their meetings. Ra's al-Ghul was, he perceived, a dangerous man, the kind of man who stabbed his allies; not the kind of man who would snatch a helpless and screaming child from the corpse of her mother. He disliked al-Ghul, and that was a new emotion: there was no drive to kill, no lust for blood, just a distaste for the man that was almost disappointing in its blandness. An unsatisfying counterpart for the loathing that, apparently, al-Ghul carried for him.

So it came as no surprise to him when he awoke just before dawn to an attempt on his life. Of course he broke the men who assaulted him; he was strong and fast, and had defeated every one of them at least ten times on the mat, though perhaps they had thought to overpower him with numbers. After that, though, surrounded by the bodies of his treacherous brethren, he had no choice but to run.

* * *

He was not prepared for how much he would miss her. He had missed her before, and had in fact wept over her death, but now that he knew her to be alive and safe under her father's care he felt her absence like a dull knife sawing at his flesh. And worse, he knew that his ejection from the League meant that he would never have the chance to vent his rage at her, never make her feel what he had felt.

He slept in what he supposed was a bunker, abandoned and bare: a half-unburied concrete shelter, walls thick enough to shelter from the cold and roof whole enough to hide him from the wind. He worked for shepherds, hiding his face, struggling to plan for his future. Worse, his mask would not last forever, and already he had begun to run low on the drugs that kept him rational.

He sent a message to Talia by one of the sheepherders, with a delivery of cheese. _Please,_ he wrote, _I am out of medicine. Your father tried to kill me and I am alone. Please bring me food and medicine, if you ever cared about my fate._

She wrote back, in chalk on a scrap of paper: _I will not go against my father_. There was no medicine with the note, nor food.

So he went into the League's fortress at night, avoiding the dojo and the garden where he had spoken with Talia, and broke the door of the infirmary in his haste. Hydromorphone, gabapentin, lidocaine; he knew the blend, names like old friends that hushed his pain and soothed his ravaged nerves.

On the way out, he saw her window light up, saw her curled head lean out to find the source of some sound he had made; so he took her, one great hand to pull her down by those curls and one strong arm to seize her up in her nightshift, and before he had taken the chance to exult in the feeling of her fists hammering his body and her spine twisting in the crook of his arm, he had done it—he had kidnapped the daughter of Ra's al-Ghul, and he was a dead man no matter what he did now.

* * *

"He'll find you," she said, in a voice raw from crying. "You know he'll never stop looking until he has me back."

"A pity," replied Bane, "that he did not look so diligently before you escaped from the pit."

"He didn't know I was born," she shot back, though he could feel the anger in her cracking into grief.

"He knew your mother was born," said Bane, who had been through this conversation a thousand times in his head. "If he had looked for her even once, he would have found you both."

"You don't know about him," retorted Talia, but she had no more heart for discussion after that, and Bane fell into an exhausted sleep while she waited, handcuffed to the bars that jutted from the broken wall twenty feet from his bed.

When he awoke twelve hours later, she had used the bucket for its intended purpose, eaten the white sheepherder's cheese and the coarse bread he'd left for her, and fallen asleep with her bound arm cocked at a painful angle. He did not dare venture close enough to wake her; the things he felt when he looked at her made him doubt his self-control, and he did not want to kill her yet.

On the second night, returning from the sheep pens, he found her weeping, and stood clenching and unclenching his hands while he decided whether to comfort her or rage at her.

"You _asshole_," she spat at him when he came closer, "why in God's name did you steal me if you were just going to leave me here?"

Before he knew it he was on her, massive hands crushing her arms and dragging her down hard enough that the handcuff cut into her wrist. "Leave you here," he repeated, feeling his scars pull under his mask as his face contorted and she began shrieking. "Leave you like you left me? God, it would be fair, wouldn't it?"

"You sent me," she panted, tight with pain, legs struggling to pull up against her abdomen for protection. "You said _goodbye_, you said _jump_! I jumped!"

"And you never came back. You found your father and you abandoned me, you _forgot_ me."

"I never forgot you," she said, but her voice broke and whatever she meant to say next turned into sobbing. It was with great difficulty that he peeled his hands away from her and backed away to collapse on his bed of blankets and sheep's wool. She nursed her wrist while she cried, and rubbed at the red marks on her arms, and—as he sat watching her with his eyes narrowed—rubbed at the places where his body had crushed hers. It set his blood boiling. He wanted to bury her in himself, to mark every part of her skin until she could not pretend to wash him away with her trembling hands.

Finally he spoke, and the mask filter hid the weakness in his voice. "Where were you, all that time while I was suffering?"

She did not meet his eyes. "I was a nine-year-old girl alone in the desert," she said. "I killed a man for his purse, I killed another man because he had food. I traveled for ten days before I realized that food could be had for the begging. I traveled for two years before I remembered the name my mother used to tell me was my father's, and I nearly died for it the first time I said it to anyone. I lived with an old woman and milked her goats." She sniffled and shifted, clearly uncomfortable on the icy floor. "Ra's—my father—found me a little more than a year ago. Someone told him a girl was looking for him. I think he expected my mother."

"A rope would have done," said Bane, surprised at how bitter his words tasted. "You could have tied it to a stone. You could have thrown me food."

"I thought you were dead." She met his eyes now, and it seemed to pain her. "By the time I stopped running, all I could remember of you was your face, all those men beating you. I don't… I'm not sure how you survived."

"Scarcely," he acknowledged. "I hid for weeks, healing. There was a doctor…" But now he was looking at her, and her eyes opened back into years of fear and pain and regret.

"How long ago," he said, finally. "How long did it take you?"

"Six months." It was a whisper.

"Six months you were with your father before you found me? Not even two years that you've been with him? And still, you _still_ chose him over me?" He found himself on his feet, and after a moment of indecision he strode over to her and opened the handcuff, replacing it with his own fist. "What did he _ever_ do for you? How _dare_ you side with him, what did he _ever_ give you?"

He was screaming, he was out of his mind; he dragged her to the makeshift bed and threw her down like a rag doll, and when she tried to scramble away he seized her feet and held her there so that she would hear every word he said, even though none of them made sense and finally there was only screaming. He pulled at her ankles hard, flinging her down flat and dragging her toward him; he knelt over her, on knees and elbows over her body as she tried to shelter herself from him, and he raged wordlessly into the protective cage she formed of her arms over her face, trying to push the hate and grief and terror and spite he carried through his mask until she carried it instead.

"Talia," he said, when his voice broke and he collapsed on top of her, "I thought you were dead, I thought you were lost. I loved you like a brother. I gave my life for yours." Her cage opened up, and at first she pushed at his shoulders, trying to dislodge him; then her arms reached up and clasped around his neck, an embrace that pulled his metal face into her neck, where the scent of her was overwhelming.

He was nearly paralyzed with grief for a few moments. Finally he felt her wriggle under him, still trying to get away, and it steeled him. "_No,_" he roared, jolting her with his body; she managed to free one leg before he pinned her with one hand clasped over her mouth and the full weight of his chest and belly across her. Her free leg beat ineffectively at his flank.

"No," he repeated, and as he settled his weight into her, a tremor flickered through her and an expression like pain distorted her face. Her lips fluttered against his hand. She writhed, trying to get out from under him, only to shudder again and relax, heaving for breath.

Confused, he took his hand from her mouth, and she licked her lips. "You're _enormous_,_"_ she panted, which was the last thing he expected, but even while he struggled to make sense of this she wriggled again, and he shook her violently under him until she cried out. It was not a cry of pain, and at the moment he realized the truth, he also recognized that she was beautiful, and she was under him, and her breasts were crushed against his chest and his massive thigh was parting her legs and he was going to be sick, he was _not this person_.

God _damn_ her, she would not poison his revenge.

He pulled himself back, and she had the dignity not to arch after him, choosing instead to catch her breath. Nor did she try to escape. There was a secret between them now, a dark madness whose consequences he dreaded. The look on her face accused him, and he knew that his body had betrayed its half of the secret just as clearly as hers had, and furthermore the hate inside him had slipped its focus and become something nebulous and awful. He wanted to crush her, yes; he wanted to cover her with his body. He wanted to feel…

"My father intercepted the note," said Talia once she had breathed her fill. A flush had begun to spread up her throat. "He told me about your plan to kill me. He told me that you would try again. And he let me answer your note, so that you'd know I wasn't fooled."

"My plan to kill you," echoed Bane, still heavy with the fury in his blood.

"He said you hated me," said Talia. Her free leg relaxed, resting gently over the back of his thigh, a comforting brand. "He said the things you've said, that you blame me for leaving you. That you would… that you said you would tear me apart with your bare hands."

"I never said those things."

"And did you think them?"

Ra's al-Ghul was a formidable man. "Yes," said Bane, and his voice was a growl. "Yes, I thought them. I _dreamed_ about them. Do you want to know what I imagined?" He leaned into her again, ignoring the spike of something darker than pain driven through his belly by the renewed contact. "I imagined crushing you like this," he said. "I imagined holding you like _this_—" and he seized her curling hair, forcing her head back until she bared her teeth in an open rictus of pain—"and I imagined my fingers digging into your throat—" his own fingers sank deep into the meat of her shoulder, and she twisted helplessly—"and I imagined making you _hurt_, Talia, the way I hurt for _years_."

"And—and do you enjoy it? The way you thought you would?" Her voice was tight, hushed with fear and anguish.

"It is _wonderful_," he growled, and if there had been no mask between them he would have sunk his teeth into her, to taste her skin as he rocked against her. Perhaps he would even have kissed her, swallowed the cries she was making with the scarred expanse of his mouth, and by God he hated her so much in that instant that the friction of her rucked-up nightshift and the smooth skin under it against his aching body felt like a beating, felt like the fists of thirty men making impact upon his flesh while far above him a tiny fleck of cloth and flesh darted black against the sun.

And she enjoyed it, convulsing with each motion of his body against hers, making it impossible for him to separate the things that he wanted, turning the violent urges that wracked him into a terrible rhythmic surge of something entirely _different_. And she was _enjoying _it.

Her hips bucked up into him and she let out a sound, a high sound just a little more vocal than a gasp, and he forced himself to lie still, pressing her deep into the blankets and the sheepskins. "Stop," he ordered her, "don't do that again, this isn't for you, damn you," but the moment he let up she rode up against his thigh and he felt her heel dig in under his buttock, trying to drag him into her.

"_Stop_," he roared, and this time instead of rising up over her he spread himself out along her, heavy as stone, the strips of flesh exposed by his mask pressed against the side of her face while his hand gripped her jaw—lightly, firmly, as if he expected to open her mouth and examine her tongue. With a mechanical rasp, he breathed in the scent of her hair, groaned, felt her quaking under him and unable to move, and rolled his hips against her. The pressure of his body upon hers was unimaginable, unbearable; he rode her with such force that he felt the blankets giving, sliding along the concrete floor of the bunker.

"Please," she gasped, "oh god, please, I can't—" Her fingers clutched at his shoulders, battered his skin, clawed at him; it fueled him, and he was relentless, taking his burning vengeful pleasure from her anyway.

"You can," he said, "you _will_."

"No—I mean—" There was real desperation in her tone, a wild fear bordering on abandon. He knew that voice, even if the broken sounds coming from her mouth were high and clear rather than the keening groans he made when he allowed himself the recklessness of his own touch.

"Don't you dare," he said. "You do not have _permission_, Talia, don't ruin my hate like this."

"I can't—if you—"

"You can," he repeated. "You're strong, Talia, oh God you are strong, I know you can hold on, you will ruin me," and he was babbling, thrusting, releasing her jaw to heft and work her breast with his hand, pressing the metal mask into her neck as though it were his skin and could feel the softness of her. It was not long until he felt her belly tighten, felt her curl up implacably under him, and with his other hand he reached up and pulled her hair, hard. "_No_," he said, and whether it was a command or a plea he didn't know, only that this motion, this violence, sated the hunger in him like nothing he could have imagined, and that the illusion would only last until he could no longer lie to himself about it.

Still, even with the bruises she must have now and the hisses of agony as he pulled her hair, Talia's hips were trapped under him, and he could not hold himself back from his riding her any more than he could have made that awful leap, and in only a few more moments her tongue curled in her mouth and her foot drummed against his buttocks in rigid frenzy, and she came under him so brutally and with such protracted force that he stopped, afraid (what was wrong with him, what hell was he being punished in now) that he had hurt her.

He drew up away from her, kneeling upright to look down at her glazed eyes and dark-flushed lips, confused and beginning to feel the torment of guilt, and aching fit to explode.

It took her a moment to gather her wits, but even with her pulse still leaping in her throat, she looked him in the eye and asked:

"Can you take off the mask? Even for a few minutes?"

This was the last thing he could have imagined, and he had no defense for it. "I take it off to eat," he said, his voice sounding far away next to the pounding of blood in his ears and the bright cutting need in his groin.

"Take it off now," she said. She was not even trying to get away, only lying there still out of breath, curling hair spilled out on his sheepskins.

"I don't want you to see," he said.

"I saw it in the hospital," she replied, "and it was worse there."

She watched while he took it off, unhooking the elaborate conduits on the front and loosening the straps where they tightened over the ears, and when he was naked before her—feeling the scarcely-healed flesh tight and puckering, remembering the fullness of his lips when he was a proud young man scarcely nineteen and sentenced to die in the pit—she looked him over, considering.

"How long before was it done?" she said at last. "Before we found you?"

"Twelve days," he replied, and the rage boiled up in him again: twelve days sooner, a single hunk of bread to make him stronger, a goddamn _rope_. "Twelve _fucking_ days, Talia, it was twelve days," and he was on her again, feeling the curve of her jaw against the few inches of his skin that still had any sensation, suckling at her collarbone and following the slim pillar of muscle that rose from her clavicle to her ear and forward to her mouth and she was kissing him, she was kissing him with no mask between them and her lips did not shy from a single ravaged inch of his mouth. She tried to divest him of his shirt, but he would not give up her mouth; she tore at his trousers instead, pushed them down over his hips, wrapped a hand around his length and stroked and swallowed the sounds he made.

They were no more naked than they had to be; if she had been wearing something beneath the nightshift, she must have got out of it while he was taking off his mask. He entered her brutally, found her wet and hungry and receptive, tore into her with such fury and abandon that he was forced to grip her at the bend of her thigh with one hand to keep her from sliding away while he propped himself on the other elbow; she rolled her hips under him, gripping his biceps and letting his weight drive into her. He felt the base of his abdomen pressing against her, felt the jolts and shocks of her buttocks slamming into his kneeling thighs and recoiling with the force of his fucking her.

It was a minute's work, perhaps two, before the white heat flaring in his belly spread outward; he felt his balls tightening, felt himself drowning in what was not after all hate nor even lust but was instead an entirely different and new thing, a thing that ripped his seed from him in terrible gasps and washed away his resentment in a torrent of something fiercer than pleasure and more awful than revenge. He was unmade; he was reborn; he leapt and he fell, he plunged into the depths, he snapped to the end of his tethering line and discovered himself lying, a free man, on the glorious stark concrete earth beyond the lip of the pit, and Talia had been his rope all along.

* * *

They lay entangled for perhaps four minutes, her fingers exploring his scars, before he felt the telltale twinges that warned him back to his mask. She helped him put it on, locking his face away where only she could ever see it; then she put on his extra shirt over her nightshift (it was large enough that she could wear it as a dress) and they began, without exchanging a word, the process of packing everything up.

"I know you could kill me in a heartbeat," she said, after they had been trudging for an hour.

"I could have killed you in a heartbeat when you were nine," he admitted, keeping his eyes on the horizon, where the faintest glow marked the east and the early summer sunrise.

"You killed _for_ me when I was nine," she said, as if none of these facts bothered her at all and she did not mind the prospect of hiking for a week for a chance to escape her father's grasp.

"When you were nine," said Bane, resting his hands on the collar of his vest, "I died for you."

"Perhaps someday I'll die for you in return," replied Talia, picking up her pace, and Bane followed her into the dark.


End file.
